Token generation events represent an excellent opportunity for investors to gain early access to some of the most promising new assets in the cryptocurrency industry.
These events, also known as “token launches” or TGEs, refer to the creation of a new blockchain-based digital asset that acts as a utility token for a specific project, and are often used as a way of raising funds. As such, TGEs generally take the form of an initial coin offering, initial Dex offering, private sale or public sale. They’re designed to boost visibility of new projects and attract investors by offering the tokens at a low entry price.
New TGEs happen all the time in the crypto industry but only a few new projects offer real value to investors. Many new tokens fail to live up to their promise, but there are a number of projects set to launch TGEs in 2023 that could well prove to be an exception to that rule. Without further ado, here are five hot new TGEs to look forward to in the New Year.
Central Bank Digital Currencies
Most countries have accepted that crypto is here to stay and as a consequence of that, many are looking to digitize their own fiat currencies with the creation of a “central bank digital currency” or CBDCs.
In reality, CBDCs are not true decentralized cryptocurrencies – rather, they can be considered as a digital version of fiat, meaning they’re controlled by that nation’s monetary authority, which is usually a central bank.
At present, just two nations have gotten CBDCs up and running – the Bahamas with its Sand Dollar that launched in 2020, and Nigeria with the e-Naira, which debuted in October 2022. However, those early trend-setters could be joined by a number of bigger nations in the coming months.
One of the front runners is China, where local reports say the People’s Bank of China is on track to launch its e-CNY digital currency in February. Pilot tests of the new asset have already taken place in cities such as Changsha, Dalian, Shanghai and Shenzhen, with the tokens being used to pay bills, transportation fares, buy and sell goods online and offline.
Kazakhstan is another country that’s taking a keen interest in CBDCs and it has tentative plans in place to launch its own national token sometime in 2023. A number of banks and local financial firms are said to be involved in pilot projects, and one of the aims is to give the Kazakh government greater regulatory control of the local economy, officials have said.
Elsewhere, Brazil is going ahead with its own plans for a pilot project for a digital reais, with an official launch slated for 2024.
Perhaps the most exciting token launch in 2023 will be the United States’ digital dollar. Although no concrete launch date has been announced, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York’s Innovation Center said in November it will kick off a 12-week proof-of-concept pilot for a CBDC in the new year. The pilot is designed to explore the feasibility of an “interoperable network of central bank wholesale digital money and commercial bank digital money operating on a shared, multi-entity distributed ledger” and will involve banks including BNY Mellon, Citi, HSBC, Mastercard, PNC Bank, TD Bank, Truist, U.S. Bank and Wells Fargo
Pendulum
CBDCs are often compared to stablecoins such as USDT and USDC, because, like those tokens, they’re pegged to the price of national currencies. Stablecoins serve a key role in the crypto industry, especially in areas such as DeFi, as they enable investors to quickly exit their positions in almost any kind of cryptocurrency to store their funds in a stable asset. It’s for this reason that we’re particularly intrigued with the upcoming launch of a new asset known as PEN.
PEN is the native token of Pendulum Chain, a smart contract-based blockchain network that aims to connect fiat rails to the decentralized financial economy. The project is centered around the idea of bridging compliant, fiat-pegged tokens from networks such as Ethereum, Polkadot, Solana and other blockchains into vibrant DeFi ecosystems in order to satisfy the demand for fiat liquidity.
SatoshiPay, the creator of Pendulum, is looking to construct the missing link between fiat and DeFi via its fiat-optimized blockchain. It promises to create on-chain utility for a number of fiat currencies, as well as multiple new fintech services. It will provide a simple way for traditional financial services such as trade financing, FOREX and savings accounts to integrate seamlessly with DeFi applications such as yield farming and lending protocols. In this way, Pendulum can emerge as a key element of Web3’s infrastructure, unlocking DeFi opportunities for numerous fiat currencies.
Pendulum’s TGE is scheduled for the first quarter of 2023 and will become an integral cog in Pendulum’s wheel, serving as a utility token that’s used for transaction fees, staking and on-chain governance. Transaction fees must be paid to use the network’s services and will be applied to any transactions on the protocol.
Flare Network
Big things are expected for the growth of blockchain interoperability in 2023 and one project that will play a key role in its development will be Flare Network. Flare is a layer-1 blockchain that aims to connect every kind of blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, metaverses, and even traditional networks. In other words, it can be thought of as the interoperability protocol that “connects everything.”
The main purpose of Flare is to enable blockchains to connect to any kind of data source, and to date the project is already partnering with Metropolis World, enabling it to bridge assets to and from other metaverses such as The Sandbox and Decentraland.
Flare’s native token FLR launches early January, when 58.3% of its total genesis supply will be allocated to the community via its initial public token distribution, cross-chain incentives and its ecosystem support program. As Flare’s utility token, FLR is what powers web3 interoperability. The unique ability to wrap FLR in smart contracts with detachable voting power will give FLR token holders the chance to participate in the Flare Time Series Oracle that delivers reliable and decentralized data to applications on Flare. By participating in FTSO, FLR holders will have the opportunity to earn risk-free yield as a reward for enabling accurate price feeds. The utility of FLR also extends to protocol governance, providing collateral for third party decentralized applications built on Flare, and network transaction fees.
Banger Games
Banger Games is not a video games developer in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s attempting to build what it calls the “Internet of Games”, with a gaming platform that utilizes blockchain to share profits between games publishers, intermediaries and players. Banger Games promises to put the PLAY into “play-to-earn” with a platform for supercharging high-level video games with blockchain benefits.
The project already has a number of titles in the works, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. CS:GO, as it’s known, is the latest edition of the popular Counter Strike video game franchise and brings innovations such as SMART tournaments that rely on smart contracts to pay out rewards to the best players. It will enable the best Counter Strike players to earn real-life rewards for their sharpshooting skills and elevate the game to another level.
What’s great about Banger Games is that it provides an easy way for any video games developer to add a play-to-earn element to their games, enabling new ways to create a more inclusive community and new revenue streams.
Key to all of this is Banger Coin, which is set to launch its TGE early in 2023. Banger Coin is envisioned as a global gaming currency that will enable video games players to monetize the time they spend playing games, earn rewards, improve their skills, buy in-game assets and enter tournaments. It will underpin a new economic system that rewards players of every level, and will be easily exchangeable with other kinds of digital asset.
SubQuery
Representing a possible game-changer for the DeFi industry is SubQuery, which is a decentralized data aggregation, indexing and querying layer for Layer-1 blockchains such as Polkadot, Ethereum and Avalanche. The project bills itself as a kind of data-as-a-service provider that gives dApp developers a simple way to query blockchains, rather than build a complex, customized back-end for processing and extracting blockchain data.
SubQuery provides a solution to one of the biggest challenges in blockchain today, which is the problem of querying blockchains for data extraction. With existing tools, it can take days to process a simple query on Polkadot or Ethereum, which stifles a number of exciting use cases in DeFi and other blockchain segments.
For instance, a decentralized insurance application that’s able to pay out drought-stricken farmers can only work properly if it has a timely way to process public weather data that’s hosted on the blockchain. This is where SubQuery can shine, providing a powerful solution for querying and aggregating public blockchain data in seconds. SubQuery has built a developer toolkit that includes an API for organizing and querying blockchain data, as well as an open-source data indexing tool that can quickly organize the data it queries. As a result, developers can create dApps that can quickly ask questions of blockchains and receive accurate answers within seconds. SubQuery’s native token SQT will be the key asset that powers this decentralized network when it launches in the first half of 2023. SQT will be used to pay transaction fees for each query, and will also serve as an incentive for participants to act as a medium of exchange in the network. In addition, SQT holders will be able to participate in the running of the protocol, proposing changes and voting on them, in line with the project’s goal to devolve governance to a decentralized autonomous organization.
